Call for papers: Organising and Accounting for Death

2025-06-01

This Call for Papers invites the management, accounting, and organisation studies communities to embark on an exploration of death, a theme both universal and deeply personal. Death is the only certain appointment in life. It concerns everyone. No one is excluded. And yet, while no one has direct experience of their own death, it profoundly shapes our relationships with ourselves and others (Derrida, 2001; Reedy & Learmonth, 2011).

As a universally shared and inevitable experience, death evokes both aversion and fascination, sparking inquiry across disciplines throughout history (Richardson, 2000). Despite this broad intellectual engagement, the field of management, accounting and organization studies has only recently begun to explore this topic (Le Theule et al., 2023, 2020; Moerman & van der Laan, 2022; Reedy & Learmonth, 2011; Pérezts et al., 2022; Smith, 2006; Yu, 2021). Emerging research has revealed that the organization of death entails a complex interplay of economic, political, cultural, spiritual, theological, ecological, and ethical factors (Pérezts et al., 2022).

While societies increasingly seek to ‘tame’ death (Candrian, 2014), we remain entangled in socioeconomic systems such as capitalism and colonialism, which shape and define its contours (Banerjee, 2008; Skeggs, 2021). These systems dictate whose lives are considered grievable and who is regarded as ‘already’ dead, reduced to ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998). Death, therefore, underpins an industry that not only sustains itself economically (Skeggs, 2021) but also has the power to reproduce and amplify preexisting inequalities. In this sense, death is deeply enmeshed in a necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019; Jagannathan & Rai, 2022) that privileges certain lives while rendering others disposable (Sargiacomo et al., 2012), urging us to develop new forms of ‘necroaccountability’ (Moerman & van der Laan, 2022, 2023; Chwastiak, 2008).

Existing literature further suggests that the distribution of grievability (Butler, 2004) is profoundly shaped by gender, class, age, caste, and racial dynamics, influencing both the struggle for recognition and the dignity of labor associated with handling and processing dead bodies (Jordan et al., 2018; Jagannathan & Rai, 2022). Death work encompasses both the ecological challenge of sustainably managing (human) remains and the delicate, impossible task of mourning (Derrida, 2001; Yu, 2021). Thus, organizing and accounting for death reflect a desperate attempt to impose order: to draw the line between presence and absence, life and death, memory and oblivion. In this process, accounting for death (Chwastiak, 2008) becomes a means of tracing what remains, as only what is lost becomes unforgettable. How, then, do we account for those who will never be remembered? How might we imagine more ethical ways of surviving death?

Along these lines, research has underscored the role of spaces and practices of commemoration in shaping our society (Cutcher et al., 2016). Examining and reshaping these spaces confronts us with both the human desire to survive through collective memory and the impossibility of truly doing so. Organizing death, then, is as much about constructing memory as it is about containing our anxieties about mortality; an act of hybris, at as it were.

While these emerging debates have already sparked important reflections, this Call for Papers invites scholars to broaden the conversation, to challenge disciplinary boundaries, and engage more extensively with the topic of organizing and accounting for death. We invite potential contributors to consider death as an organizational phenomenon; to examine how death comes to be organized and accounted for, and to reflect on how death relates to work and labour, in literal and more figurative ways.

We welcome submissions related but not limited to:

  • How death and discourses on death can unsettle organization studies
  • Accounting and accountability for death in the ‘majority world’
  • Spaces, places and settings associated with and of death
  • Necropolitics and necrocapitalism
  • The marketization of death and mourning
  • Necroaccountability in both times of war and peace
  • Death work as abject labour
  • More than human and post-human death/s
  • Theories of death that can inform organizational analysis
  • Mourning of and at work
  • The evolving, and socially situated death ‘industry’
  • Global and cultural variance in how death is organized, and death as an organizing phenomenon
  • Images and representations of death in and through organizations
  • The social contours of death and its organization
  • Death’s connections to precarity, inequality and social injustice
  • The relationship between death and geo-politics, war and the climate emergency
  • Technologies of death
  • Decolonising death

Among other things, death confronts us existentially, challenging conventional ways of conducting and writing research. Death, in fact, unsettles and ‘levels’ (de Curtis, 1964) differences (including linguistic ones), even though the experience of dying, the manner of death, and the practices of mourning are always shaped by specific organizational and cultural contexts. Death urges us to research and write differently (Pullen et al., 2020). For this reason, we also invite colleagues to engage in experiments in writing otherwise. This may include writing in one’s own mother tongue (and we therefore welcome submissions in languages other than English, accompanied by an English translation on facing pages), not only as an act of epistemic decolonization, which death itself, by its very nature, compels us to consider, but also as a way to express culturally specific meanings of death, meanings that render the experience both universal and uniquely situated.

Submitting your paper

Papers may be submitted electronically from 23 September 2026 until the deadline date of 27 January 2027 (final deadline) at: Submissions | puntOorg International Journal.

Papers should be no more than 45 pages, including references, and will be blind reviewed following the journal’s standard review process. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the guidelines published on the journal’s website. When feasible, manuscripts submitted in languages other than English will be assigned to reviewers proficient in those languages. Nonetheless, an accompanying English translation is required to make the work accessible to a wider audience of reviewers and readers.

A paper development workshop will be held online via a password-protected Zoom link in Spring 2026. Participation in the workshop will not be a guarantee of acceptance of the paper for the thematic issue, and neither is the workshop a requirement for consideration of a paper for the thematic issue. For further questions about the thematic issue please use the guest editors’ contact email.

Muhammad Junaid Ashraf (j.ashraf@essex.ac.uk)

Daniela Pianezzi (daniela.pianezzi@univr.it)

Luigi Maria Sicca (lumsicca@unina.it)

Shahzad Uddin (snuddin@essex.ac.uk)

Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar (ghazal.zulfiqar@lums.edu.pk)

info@puntoorginternationaljournal.org

 

References

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Banerjee, B. (2008). Necrocapitalism, Organization Studies, 29, 1541–63.

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Candrian, C. (2014). Taming death and the consequences of discourse. Human Relations, 67(1), 53-69.

Chwastiak, M. (2008). Rendering death and destruction visible: Counting the costs of war. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 19(5), 573-590.

Cutcher, L., Dale, K., Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2016). Spaces and places of remembering and commemoration. Organization, 23(1), 3-9.

de Curtis, A. (1964). 'A Livella'. Available at: https://www.italyheritage.com/learn-italian/literature/toto-a-livella.htm (last seen 18 August 2019).

Derrida, J. (2001). The Work of Mourning ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jagannathan, S. and Rai, R. (2022). The necropolitics of neoliberal state response to the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Organization, 29(3), 426-448.

Jordan, P. (pseudonym), Ward, J. and McMurray, E. (2018). Dealing with the dead: Life as a third-generation independent funeral director. Work, Employment and Society, 33(4), 700-708.

Le Theule, M. A., Lambert, C., and Morales, J. (2023). Accounting to the end of life. Scarcity, performance and death. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 102377.

Le Theule, A-M., Lambert, C., and Morales, J. (2020). Governing death: Organizing end-of-life situations’, Organization Studies, 41(4), 523-542.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Moerman, L., and van der Laan, S. (2022). Accounting for and accounts of death: Past, present and future possibilities. Accounting History, 27(1), 6-23.

Moerman, L., and van der Laan, S. (2023). Call for papers. Accounting for death: An historical perspective. Accounting History, 28(2), 358-359.

Pérezts, M., Fotaki, M., Shymko, Y., and Islam, G. (2022). Special Issue on: Organizational Ethics of Life and Death. Call for submissions. Business Ethics Quarterly, 32: 510.

Pullen, A., Helin, J. and Harding, N. (Eds.) (2020). Writing differently. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing.

Reedy, P. and Learmonth, M. (2011). Death and organization: Heidegger’s thought on death and life in organizations, Organization Studies, 32(1), 117–31.

Richardson, R. (2000). Death, dissection and the destitute. University of Chicago Press.

Sargiacomo, M., Servalli, S., and Carnegie, G. D. (2012). Accounting for killing: Accountability for death. Accounting History, 17(3-4), 393-413.

Skeggs, B. (2021). Necroeconomics. Historical Social Research, 46(4), 123-142.

Smith, W. (2006). Organizing death: Remembrance and re-collection, Organization, 13(2), 225-244.

Twyford E. (2021). A thanatopolitical visualisation of accounting history: Giorgio Agamben and Nazi Germany. Accounting History, 26(3), 352–374.

Yu, A. (2021). Accountability as mourning: Accounting for death in the time of COVID-19’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 90, 101198.